Need a new hard drive and ?'s - recommendations?

Hello! The G5's are SATA (serial ata) while the G4's are all ata/ide (aka parallel ata). You can get an 80 gig for 49 bucks at OWC and find others such as THIS NEW DRIVE 160 gig drive for 50 bucks (plus 10 bucks shipping) and many other new drives on eBay. Tom

Danielle,

Thomas's links are first rate.

Store or brand ? Let's just say that there is an enormous difference in quality, especially if you are going to use it for your main drive.

Hitachi DeskStar seem to do extremely well in Europe, but US posters do seem to have issues with them.
I have more than a few Western Digital, like Thomas has given you a link to.
Seagate are first rate too.

Essentials are: get PATA, get something with an 8MB cache, some only have 2MB, some may have more, if so get it. This will make an enormous difference to the apparent speed and lifespan of the disk.

With an MDD you don't have any worries about using drives over 128Gb, all Macs before MDD's were limited to internal IDE drives of that size - although SCSI and Firewire was OK.

With a drive over 200Gb, you won't be able to boot of OS9, should you ever need to. Don't casually say "Oh I'll never boot into OS9 again" because if your Mac can do it (the MDD can) then one day you just might have to fix something, ie. install a firmware update on a replacement optical drive / modem / network card, etc, etc.

Otherwise get the biggest you can afford.

ps. You may have the opportunity to purchase a fast hard drive, ie. something over the usual 7200rpm, perhaps 10,500rpm, or faster still (usually only SCSI drives are faster), these are usually more expensive and generate a LOT more noise, and LOTs and LOTs more heat. These may already be issues in your MDD.

Danielle
I have two of the following drives in my MDD. Noise and heat have shown no change. Both are three years old, never given any problems.

WD Caviar® SE
WD3000JB
EIDE Hard Drives
300 GB, 100 MB/s, 8 MB Cache, 7200 RPM

Danielle,

Yep. All 3 brands are first rate. I have an Hitachi DeskStar, two WD Caviar and a Seagate Barracuda. I also have countless WD, Hitachi and Seagate drives before that, none have ever failed. All 3 are slightly more than other manufacturers, but nowhere near expensive.

Seagate Barracuda have fluid bearings, meaning quiet, fast and allegedly longer life (It's usually the drive arm that fails rather than disk bearings).

Hitachi do up to 500Gb.

The cheapest way to buy a drive is to buy oem, that is, a bare drive. This is the kind of drive you will get from New Egg or Other World Computing and most other online stores. If you buy brick-and-mortar, such as Best Buy, you'll get a boxed drive with
a cable, screws, some (windows) software, and a printed manual - and usually pay significantly more unless you get the unit on sale. You will almost certainly
have to format the drive to make it Mac compatible, but this is quite easy using Disk Utility. You can use both PATA and SATA drives in your machine, but would have to purchase a SATA pci card to do so, so that's probably out if price is important. I love Western Digital drives in G4s, but I've had good success with Hitachi in my G4. My recommendation would be at least 250g, such as this Western Digital: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822144701 - just $70. I don' t like the latest generation of Seagates as they draw a lot of power on startup and cause problems in some systems. Samsung makes great drives - cool running, quiet, fast - but have a slow access time so make a better backup drive than boot drive. Many people love Maxtors in their macs, but certain models run much hotter than other drives, so I avoid them also. If you are still using the original drive, almost any new drive will give you a noticeable boost, so don't sweat it too much. Good Luck.

mac pro, dual 1.25 g4 - Pioneer 111d, LG H10, Plextor 716UF, LG 4163,Pioneer 112 Mac OS X (10.4.9) dell 9200, dell xps 400 Benq 1650, Plextor Premium

Kind of an old post, but believe it or not, many of us do read the older files.

Simon Teale,

You mentioned in a post to Danielle regarding internal hard drives that "With a drive over 200Gb, you won't be able to boot of OS9, should you ever need to. Don't casually say "Oh I'll never boot into OS9 again" because if your Mac can do it (the MDD can) then one day you just might have to fix something, ie. install a firmware update on a replacement optical drive / modem / network card, etc, etc."

Well, is the same true if one partitions the larger drive?

Patt

DDR G4 DP Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Patt,

Partitioning the drive should make it OK. But back in OS9 world I think there used to be restrictions, like it had to go on the 100MHz ATA ribbon. But that could just be an old wives tale.

If it's imporant to you I'll partition one of my big drives, put OS9 on it and try booting. It's backed up just now (to an external firewire drive) so it'd only be an overnight restore to get it back.

Danielle,

I have 4 drives in my Dual 867 MDD, a 250GB Western Digital, a 200GB WD, a 120GB WD and the original 60GB IBM. About 2 hours ago, I replaced the 60 and 120GB drives with 2 Serial ATA (SATA) 500GB drives ($150 each from OWC) and a SATA PCI controller card. The PCI card was required to make the drives work in older Macs.

Investing this kind of money in upgrading an older Mac is usually not worth it, so I decided to spend a little extra on the SATA drives because I will be able to move them directly into a new Mac Pro that I going to buy sometime next year. But this is not the reason I am writing you.

I now have 2 spare drives that work perfectly, but they are too small for me to use, even as backup drives. So I making you an offer. I think the 120GB Western Digital drive would make an excellent replacement drive, so I am willing to give it to you for free. All you have to do is pay for shipping, which should run less than 10 bucks.

Let me know what you decide.
Keith

I think you're right, Simon.

I installed Panther on my old 45 gig drive from the G3 and it works fine, then copied over the OS 9 from firewire drive to a scrouged 8 gig from an old PC. OS 9 works fine in classic only, but freezes if I boot into OS 9 alone. I'm going to initialize the panther hard drive and partition, then try to install 9 from the panther drive into the 2nd partition. Perhaps that will work better than what I did before.

I did include a 9 along with the Panther on the 45 gig, but as silly as it may sound, I'm not sure where to put the applications etc. since the only file I see is System that holds 9. Where dose one put Desktop, Applications for )S 9, and any others?

Patt

PS
Sorry Danielle, didn't mean to take up your space with my questions.

Hi Keith,

I noticed Danielle may not be subscribed to this post any longer since her original post was June 15, 2007, but if she's not interested in your offer, I sure am.

Patt

Sticking while the irons hot...

DDR G4 DP Mac OS X (10.3.9)

I have had my g4 for some time now. i have two hard drives an 175 gig and a 125 gig. thats all i know. My g4 freezes all the time, half my software is missing. I tried my restore disk, but had no luck. I have no safari or flash ect. the. i just want my mac to run like a top. have no problems. thats why i bought it. please help. dustyhanson@hotmail.com